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Dave Eggers

A medium-shifting polymath, Dave Eggers is widely known for his fiction and non-fiction, but he is or has been, among other things, a screenwriter, editor, publisher and educator. During his college years, Eggers' life was upended when his parents both died within months of each other, leaving him to be the main caregiver for his younger brother while kick-starting his writing career. After founding the influential publishing house McSweeney's, he turned his unusual circumstances into the basis of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), which made him a literary star. Although his subsequent writing endeavors, usually offbeat to varying degrees, weren't met with the same rapturous acclaim, he kept busy with numerous McSweeney's projects and setting up 826 Valencia, a youth-focused nonprofit education organization. He came back into the spotlight with 2009's Zeitoun, a non-fiction book involving Hurricane Katrina. The same year, his earliest screenwriting efforts found their way to the screen in the form of the indie dramedy "Away We Go" and "Where the Wild Things Are," Spike Jonze's pensive and moody riff on the illustrated classic. Continuing to reliably offer up new works, Eggers seemed intent on undercutting the notion of a straightforward literary career.